Thursday, March 17, 2011

Best 5 Incredibly Odd/Disturbing Uses for Human Hair

Yeah, it just got all weird up in here. Although frankly, it was never all that normal up in here to begin with... 

5. Creating statues of President Obama
If you ever get the craving to make some sort of monument to the president, this is certainly an option for the construction material. An hair stylist in Beijing made this flattering statue in about seven days (with about 4 kg of hair), and it certainly is… Wow.


4. Making soy sauce
Yep, this is a gross one. Apparently, a “resourceful” company in China treated human hair, which is rich in the proteins that are also in soybeans, to distill its amino acids and pass it of as soybean oil.

3. Cleaning up oil spills
It seems that NASA tried to use human hair to clean up oil spills. The thinking behind the idea was that if animals’ fur can absorb oil, why can’t human hair? So an intrepid hairdresser decided to test the idea with the help of NASA and bunch of nylon bags full of hair. No word yet on the results. While the idea is a little gross that the solution to oil spills is throwing our hair into the ocean, it is cost effective; at the time of the study, it cost about $10 to recover a gallon of oil. With this new hair technique, it’s estimated that the cost would be as little as $2.

2. Gardening
While hair can be used as a fertilizer, there’s also a company out there that uses hair to weave into mats to protect the roots of plants from such mean things as weather and insects. Cool stuff.

1. Creating solar panels
see those horizontal strands? That's HAIR
This is the craziest, potentially most awesome use for hair. A teen in Nepal created a solar panel that replaces silicon with hair. Because silicon is pricey and hair is, well, clearly not pricey, this could totally increase the viability of solar energy. Basically, the way it works is that hair contains melanin, a light sensitive pigment that can be used as a conductor. The kid who created the panel has since tested it for feasibility, so here’s hoping it works out.

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